The chair

Mi

I wanted to scream out loud. Normally I tried to be quite even when I was in the most pain but I was failing and even that wasn’t enough. My lungs swelled against my rib cage with the agony it couldn’t contain and even though I sobbed loudly it wasn’t enough to show the agony I was really feeling. This pain made the agony of an Ibuprofen overdose seem like a holiday. Liz’s words where words were eroding me from the inside out and I wanted to scream in protest to the burning.

The bedroom door was knocked on twice before it was opened and Esmee and Emmet walked in one heading to the left and the other to the right so they could both have a go at containing me or murdering me, whatever was closer to their hearts right then. I wouldn’t have blamed them for the choice to kill. I had not seen the damage I could have been casing to the little ones until it was too late but by then the damage was done and I had infuriated the grandparents and worse, the mother and farther.

The instinct was to apologize act like the five letter word made it all go away and the situation would be changed but the word in reality made no difference, did not change the effect of the actions or excuse what had been done and I could not speak anyway as I knew any attempt to make myself vocal would just result in the screaming. 

“No one’s angry with you darling,” Esmee said first as she came at me from towards the right, “and there’s no need to be so upset, my mum spoke out of turn and we have told her of it. You didn’t hurt Mia, she’s completely fine and you were doing so well.”

 Emmet got to me on the left as I looked at Esmee and touched my shoulder gently. I moved away jerking backwards out of his grip and tripping over my own feet so I landed in pile of arms and legs on the ground, pain pulling up one of my wrists as the carpet burnt the flesh. That was all that was needed to make it too much to bear and even though it barely hurt at all compared to some tumbles I took the screaming chocked up from my locked lungs and got released into the world in a howl that I tried to muffle with one of my fists at the same time as frantic tears dampened my cheeks and made my eyes sting. My insides felt like they were going to explode my lungs burst open and my pulsing heart break in half, flooding me with my own blood and allowing me to drown.

Both Esmee and Emmet were beside me in seconds now Hands embracing me from all directions, two locked around the side of me head like a vice the others examining limbs. “Where are you hurt honey wears the pain?” Esmee asked tentatively bending my joints to try and provoke a reaction. They would never find the pain that way. They could look for days, even crawl under the skin and examine the organs and there would be no sign. Physically I was normal almost complete. When I hadn’t been eating there had been damage but even little bits of that were reversing now. There was no pain so why did I want to scream, why would the tears not go away.

“I’m not hurt, it didn’t hurt me,” I squeaked, trying to scramble away from the holds of hands. For a start they shouldn’t have been trying to help me it didn’t happen in the normal laws of the universe. Someone didn’t hurt two peoples young and get away with it, they most certainly were not kind and gentle towards them. They did not care if the attacker got hurt, so where was their violence?

“So there’s no back or neck pain? All limbs are intact and in fully working order and you didn’t hit your head?” Emmet tried to confirm “So why did you scream? It’s OK to be injured; it’s not OK to be injured and to hide it.”

“I’m not injured, I’m hurting!” I yelled struggling free of the hands that held my head still and rolling up into the smallest ball I could manage. It was bigger than it used to be. The extra weight that was now packed onto my bones stopped such convenient rolling up. I was more than conscious to the space I was taking up in the world, in the room, in this precious family’s life.

“That’s Ok we can deal with that too, you just tell us what to do. You obviously don’t want us to touch you right now.” That wasn’t true; being held in their arms had always made me feel better and worse all at the same time. It caused the most glorious pain to shoot around my body. Before them it felt like I had always been alone. Even When Arabella was alive I tried to hide my pain for her, the scars and the tears belonged to me alone and then they were here. Emmet sat gently on the edge of my bed six month before and almost instantly I mind opened to him. He had understood me and looked after me more in those few seconds then I had ever known before. He had held me up and supported me there even when I was on my knees screaming, even when I had slipped away,

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I sobbed. What else was there to say? How I could I tell him that I needed him when there was nothing that I could ever do to deserve him. I couldn’t even choke down a bowl of soup for him or make what should have been one of the best days of my life, the first and day of something shiny and brilliant go well. All they wanted was my recovery. For me to walk in the world without all the shit that came with me and I couldn’t even start to give it to them.

“I try; I really try all of the time, to stand up to do the right thing, to be better. To be good for you, to be something that you can be proud of, to be something worth keeping and I always fail and I am so sorry. You must really hate me by now.”

“Well that’s not true, and we can’t always stand up all of the time,” Emmet confirmed getting to his knees, putting both his arms in under my ball and hosting me clean into the air before going over and sitting in the rocking chair. My legs draped over his and the side of my face buried into his chest just under his chin. Slowly he made the seat swing backwards and forwards and any thoughts I had of trying to scramble off of his lap went away. The smooth rocking and his arms around mine soothing me from the inside out. I could never deserve Emmet or Esmee but I was not perfect or strong enough to deny them when they tried to help me. My soul cried out for it.

“I’m sixteen not six you know. You haven’t got to do this,” I half moaned to Emmet even though I griped onto the fabric of his shirt so tightly he probably couldn’t have put me down if he wanted to. To let him go would have been the best thing. To be able with conviction to send them booth away so they could enjoy their life without me but even though it was the  kindest thing I could do, they weren’t going to leave without a fight, and I didn’t have the strength that was needed to destroy myself by watching them leave if they didn’t’ really want to. Somehow we had got hopelessly stuck.

“It doesn’t matter how old you are, rocking is proven to help. It’s comforting and it calms you down.  Hence why you have a nursing chair in your room Mi. What did you thing we were expecting you to look after Mia?”

“I don’t think it’s the chair Emmet,” I whispered, my voice still thick from the tears that were left over in my throat. The stubborn one that were darker and never got out to see the world. “I think it’s who’s in the chair with me.”

people not diagnosis

UGH... i used to be able to write so much better then this. sorry people, i'm trying my best

People not diagnosis

 “Well I hate to butt in but I think that’s enough for one day, maybe you should hit the road Liz before you say something that you really regret.” Emmet said reacting in my absence of a comeback to her. I had nothing. There was nothing. Her words had left me empty. She probably hadn’t known that she hurt me, she probably didn’t even realise what she had said but my mother had always managed to do this to me. Left me breathless floored me with her words but the worst thing was she normally blamed me. I had been diagnosed with BPD what felt like a life time ago but once the initials were mentioned, once on paper they were put beside your name, they never really went away. Even now people used the three initials against me and my mum was one of the worse culprits. She used her words without thinking and then blamed me when they hurt by saying it was my personality disorder talking for me clouding the way things looked inside my mind but maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe it was just the fact that I had spent my entire life trying to be good for my mum and dad, trying to make them proud of me and she had just confirmed that for a huge part of it, in the times when I had needed them the most. I was nothing but a huge disappointment to her. Maybe in those times I was allowed to me heartbroken, Maybe it wasn’t just an age old diagnosis of three letters controlling me, after all if it was now and they were accessing me they would quickly find I had very few of the characteristics Of borderline personality disorder. Why did I always have to be BPD girl? I was Esmee not a box with a name on it.

“I haven’t said anything; I don’t understand why everyone is ganging up on me.”

“Then listen,” I shouted angrily spinning around to turn to my mother, “listen to what you done to her, she two floors up and I can hear her crying!” I shouted my numbness turning hot. I may have disappointed her but I was a bigger person because of my illness, I understood the pain and the fight that went with overcoming an eating disorder and it was now my job to protect my little sister who was going through the same thing. “Anorexia is not a choice, it’s not a diet or a fad or phase people go through. It’s a disease and you have no right to judge unless you are also willing to judge someone with cancer. I was lost to it. Locked somewhere deep inside of it and I couldn’t get out. The worse thing was I didn’t even know that it was killing me.” I sighed turning away from the table and towards the door so I could go and check on Mi even though Emmet squeezed my shoulder to stop me.

“I know you’re disappointed in me,” I whispered with my back still turned away from my mother worried that if I looked at her I might have actually cried. “Sometimes I am disappointed in myself. Sometimes I don’t even know whether I am coming or going but I try my best and with Mi moving here, maybe you should try a bit harder too.”

(Esmee) Loved you better

Loved you better

Esmee

“What the hell mum?” I screamed rounding myself in on her position throwing my arms in the air in my annoyance at the same time as Emmet came around to stand at my side. “What the hell do you think you were doing? I told you to shut up in the nicest way possible. I gave you an excuse to leave the table but you decided to keep on pushing the situation! What the bloody hell did you think it was going to achieve? I almost screamed my blood boiling inside my veins from my annoyance. I loved my mother but at that moment I hated what she had become. Her encouragement to try and make Mia eat was nothing more than unjustifiable black mail and she had used a baby to make her point, a tiny human that couldn’t speak for herself and she turned her into a weapon to destroy. She put Crystals petty remarks to shame  and in the proses she had sent one of the most precious people in the world to me run from the room in floods of tears is she was anyone else her cruelty would have been unforgivable.

“I was simply trying to move the situation on a bit we had all been sitting around the table for ages and Mi had to eat her soup and your approach of sitting there and mollycoddling wasn’t getting the job done. I thought I would try the tough love approach.” My mother said trying to justify her cruel words like they were OK. Like her approach hadn’t caused any problems, like Mi hadn’t ran from the room crying but had downed her soup and claimed that she would never have any more problems with food again because someone had told her that her problems were stupid.

“Tough love doesn’t work,” I said exasperated trying to stop myself from shouting. My anger wouldn’t make her listen. Raised voices would make something inside of her shut down like it always had. I could never get her to listen when I raised my voice even when I was a teenager and shouting all the feelings I couldn’t understand at her because they were bubbling somewhere under the surface of my scared skin and burning me from the inside out would she try and comprehend that some feeling were too big to be whispered. Some had to be shouted and screamed about before they caused you to bleed out.

“Love works mum.” I said firmly pulling away from Emmet and sitting down on the chair Mi had been sat on so I could try and look into her eyes. There had to be a way to drive my point home. A way to make my mum see that anorexia was so much more than a phase. She had some wisdom as she had seen it devour me so fully but years had passed since she saw anorexic Esmee, since she saw an Esmee that was so under control by a part of her that she called Amy and years made memories blurry in anyone’s memory.

“Pure love works, a pure loving understanding of the way an anorexic mind works is what works. Gentle loving guidance and encouragement is what helps. Mi needs someone to fight on her side. To stand up beside her and fight whatever demon lies in that bowl of soup not someone to tell her that it should be easy and to just get on with it and to make up some crap that she is in some way hurting another person because she herself is being tortured is just cruel. You were just cruel mum.” I moaned trying to take a deep breath to calm my racing pules and erratic breathing even though in reality I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry out. I wanted to tell her that the words she used had sliced over my skin as well, that the task she called easy had pushed me to the very edge of my resolve and I almost hadn’t made it either. I had almost lost a fight to orange despair.  

“Well that’s a load of rubbish isn’t it, all this about pure love. Love doesn’t mean a thing in this situation. I couldn’t have loved you anymore. They gave you to me so tiny and new and said that I could take you home and I felt nothing but love for you more love than any other parent in the world. So imaging my upset and disappointment when every other person’s child was heading off to college and I had to section mine into the new state of the art psyceatric home because she was damn set on starving herself to death. I damn sure loved you enough Esmee, I damn sure loved you enough. You had everything you ever wanted. We protected you from everything. Nurtured every interest, praised you hugged you, talked to you, spoilt you and you repaid us by starving yourself, cutting your skin and trying to end your life without so much as a thought about us. So I am damn well sure it’s not about love, because I love you. I will always love you more than you can ever know and I am proud of what you become but even though I try to understand, I will never be anything other than disappointed in what you did to yourself because I loved you better than that.”